AI is not benign.
Summary of my comment: the study showed that the AI tool in question was an effective tool for the task, nothing more.
I didn’t read this particular article, but I recently read a different one about the same study. I also clicked into the study itself and read the abstract and everything else that was freely available. The study was paywalled, but as far as I could tell:
- Performance immediately displayed a sustained increase of 24% relative to baseline while using the AI tool in question
- Immediately after the tool was taken away (after using it for three months), performance was 20% lower than the baseline
- The study did not check to see what level performance returned to after three months without it, nor when it returned to baseline levels
- The study also did not compare performance drops after returning from a three month vacation
- The study did not compare performance drops when losing access to other tools
This outcome is expected if given a tool that simplifies a process and then losing access to it. If I were writing code in Notepad and using _v2, _v3, etc for versioning, was then given an IDE and git for three months, then had to go back to my old ways with Notepad, I’d expect to be less effective than I had been. I’ve been relying on syntax highlighting, so I’m going to be paying less attention to the specific monochrome text than I used to. I’ll have fallen out of practice from using the version naming techniques that I used to use. All of the stuff that I did to make up for having worse tooling, I’m out of practice with.
But that doesn’t mean that I should use worse tools.
lime@feddit.nu 21 hours ago
just like how lumberjacks get worse at using an axe after leaning on chainsaws.